Those who study our senses remind us that smell is the sense that is most provoking for our memory. The middle of last month I was in the mountains of western North Carolina. As I hiked around the area inbetween the sessions of the event I was attending, I came upon a small segment of Southern Appalachian Bog. It was carefully protected with large educational signs full of information on exotic invasive plants. A boardwalk wound its way through the bog. On the bog's far side, just beyond the swirling brushes where you can clean the bottoms of you shoes to discourage the spread of unwanted seeds, my nostrils filled with the sweet smell of wild grapes. The birds had pretty much picked clean the grape vines, but their fragrance clung to the warm southern air.
With one deep inhale of that grape-tinged air, I time traveled back to elementary school in the late 1950's and early 1960's in upstate New York. Herman Avenue School sat on a large piece of land in a residential neighborhood. There were playing fields and space to run all around the school. At the edge of the school property on the east side, there was a home whose back yard was filled with Concord grape vines. Concord grapes are native to the northeastern United States. As elementary school students of a certain age, we would wiggle on the ground underneath the vines to grab a grape snack during morning recess. I imagine the homeowners had some sense of what was going on, but we were never caught or reprimanded. It was a delicious recollection for me, in the North Carolina mountains more than fifty years later. And still sun, rain, and the right soil deliver this tasty treat. Or as Galileo Galilei once wrote: The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
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heartlandlistening 